Weekly Question

Leave your response as a comment on this post by the beginning of class on March 30, 2016. Remember, it only needs to be three or four sentences. For these weekly questions, I’m mainly interested in your opinions, not so much particular “facts” from the class! If you sign in using your AccessNet ID and password you won’t have to fill in the name, email and captcha fields when you leave your comment.

Here is the question:

Do a little bit of research and come up with an example of how R is used. You can describe either a company using R and what they use it for, a news story about how companies are using it, or an interesting package that does some interesting functionality. Write one to three sentences on what you found and the URL where you found it.

(Hint: Just Google “companies using R” or “applications of R” or something like that. Examples aren’t too difficult to find.)

44 Responses to Weekly Question

A theme of companies that use R are banks. Banks like Bank of America and ANZ, which is the fourth largest bank in Australia, are using R reporting and credit risk analysis. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have also utilized R to analyze status updates along with monitoring user experience on the site.

One of the projects that Google uses R for is the “Google Flu Trends” project. For this project, Google uses R to estimate current flu activity based on Google results. Google Trends collects user search queries, correlation tests are run, and R is used to “massage” the data and create models with weights for each search term.

Companies within the finance and insurance industries use R to develop new trading, pricing, and optimization strategies to increase returns and minimize risk. As an example, Lloyds of London insurance market uses R to model the potential costs associated with catastrophes such as hurricanes and earthquakes.

The New York Times has been using R in the process of constructing interactive visualizations. Only hours after Michael Jackson’s death, the newspaper posted an article titled “Jackson’s Billboard Rankings Over Time” and in which there is a chart showing the Billboard rankings of each of Jackson’s hits over time as sparklines, and comparing his output to that of The Beatles, U2, Mariah Carey, Usher and Boyz II Men. The graphic department used R to find trends in the data collection of Billboard Rankings, then used R to graph the data, and cleaned up in Illustrator and moved into Flash.

Using statistical analysis and with the help of R studio scientists are researching how to create rechargeable alkali ions batteries. Considering that alkali ion batteries are the dominant source of energy storage today, this research of ions is helping make huge leaps in high density storage. The researchers in this articles are dealing with complex chemical equations that are made easy to analyze with the help of R and R studios.

Kickstarter, a social funding program where individuals can donate cash to get a worthy project going y uses R to interpret, interact and visualize the funding. One of their charts, generated by R, shows the rapid decrease in the number of days it takes a project to accumulate $5 Million. With such a rapid growth of kick-started projects, the company is able to recognize it’s accomplishments of these projects by doing so.

Companies such as twitter use R for data visualization reasons. For example, twitter uses R to create a geocoded map to show where heavy traffic from users who use geotags come from. This map also shows how intense (dense) the usage of geotags are in certain areas.

Facebook uses R for Exploratory Data Analysis, Experimental Analysis, Big-Data Visualization, Human Resources, and user behavior analysis related to status updates and profile pictures. Facebook is a company that deals with a lot of data more than 500 terabytes a day and R is widely used at Facebook to visualize and analyze that data. Applications of R at Facebook include user behavior, content trends, human resources and even graphics for the IPO prospectus..

Google is one company that uses R to produce better results for companies using Google’s advertising products. They use R for regression models, a statistical technique at Google used to evaluate the factors that lead to user satisfaction of Google products. They also use R to determines the effectiveness of display ads for its customers.

The R programming language is used by companies to increase efficiency by splicing up large amounts of data into smaller, more easily processed chunks of data by multiple servers. Facebook uses a technique called “power analysis” with the help of R programming to see if they have sufficient information gathered about their users’ interactions with new website features.

Facebook and other social media companies are increasingly using R to understand how their users are interacting with their services. They use the behavioral data that can be mined through 500 terabytes of data usage per day. The data gained from R analysis helps Facebook understand what their users are doing throughout the day, and how viral memes or picture or stories propagate through people’s feeds.

After some research, I discovered that R is used by Bank America in their financial modeling. Particularly, the company likes R for its visualization tools and data-crunching capabilities. The article even reports that the Vice President of Bank of America thinks, “R makes our mundane tables stand out.”

ScaleR is a pack of algorithms that really accelerates the Big Data process. It allows a ton of added functionality without the trouble of learning any new languages. ScaleR utilizes the power of parallel processing, which allows you to run bits of information on multiple servers at once, preventing memory shortages as well as providing better results.

The R application is a very interesting. After some research I found out that many companies use R. R is a data analysis software for employees to use to make sense of data for statistical analysis, data visualization, and predictive modeling. All which carry great value to companies. One company that uses R is Facebook, I was honestly surprised by this fact. Facebook uses R many reasons. Such as:
Analysis of Facebook Status Updates
Facebook’s Social Network Graph.
An intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering teams worked on data visualizing using R. He described Visualizing data like a photography. The intern took interest in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. He wanted a visualization that would show cities which had a lot of friendships between them. The sample began with about ten million pair of friends from their own data warehouse or in other words Apache Hive. He combined that data with each user’s current city. After that he merged the data with longitude and latitude of each city. After that point he began exploring R, an open resource of statistics environment. After minutes of exploring R and adding some conditions the blob had turned into a wonderful detailed map of the world. visualization is a tool that R is great with.

I decided to check out some cool R packages. R is extremely powerful in data analysis and with the right packages you can accomplish an extensive amount of data analysis. I looked at a package called “vcd”. VCD stands for “Visualizing Categorical Data”. The package contains visualization techniques, data sets, summary and inference code aimed at categorical data, or data that can be separated into groups. The package places emphasis on grid graphics.

One company that uses R is Facebook. Their data team implements this tool is by analyzing users’ status updates. They categorize the words used in each status and group them according to topic. Then, they analyze which topic group is used at which time of the day, and which topic group is used most frequently. They also analyze these topic groups based on age, location, and occupation, and how these pieces of data relate to friend count and overall social media usage.

A team at Cornell University used an R package called “sphet” to estimate and test spatial models with heteroskedastic innovations. R is used to take datasets containing variables and observations to generate conclusions (spatial matrices) that improve efficiency and consistency. It creates a tool for estimating variance-covariances of events to reduce error. This has many applicable uses all throughout business and technology (ie. manufacturing efficiency).https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sphet/vignettes/sphet.pdf

The dating site, OkCupid uses R to identify trends about the love lives of a typical OkCupid member. OkCupid is considered the “google of online dating” with 3.5 active members. The company’s co-founder Christian Rudder’s crew uses R to visualize big data quickly, something they couldn’t do with Excel. Rudder stated, “R lets us get a ‘zoomed-out’ view of what’s going on with the data, which helps us decide quickly if the tack we’re taking with the data is yielding something interesting.” One way the company has used R was to recognize patterns to compare the dating habits of gay and straight members.

One of my favorite news sites is Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com. They make visualizations on everything from sports, to politics, to when most people arrive at a party. These visualizations are insightful ways to view large amounts of data in neat graphs.

Google uses R to measure the effectiveness of the ads on their site. It runs hundreds of tests a month using R to try to determine what factors lead to an effective ad and to see how the add affects future purchase decisions. Its really cool to see that a company as large as google makes use of the same program we are learning.

The New York Times has been utilizing R technology since 2009 to support its developmental presentation data analysis and data visualization. NYT uses R language to develop and implement their data journalism on the website as well as the newspaper. New York Times graphics editor and R pioneer described R in a recent podcast as “The greatest software on Earth”.

The reason why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau uses R is because there are recent graduates graduating out of college using R. They are using a platform that they are already use to. Another reason why they are using R is because The Mac and PC versions are similar. Majority of college students are using a Mac, once they are out of college they at least have the knowledge of R to navigate effectively.

One of my favorite apps right now is Zillow. Zillow uses R to produce statistical predictive products. Zillow predicts full estimated costs of renting or purchasing real estate through the use of R. Zillow and its use R allows its users to make better data driven decisions.http://strataconf.com/stratany2012/public/schedule/detail/26345

One of my favorite apps right now is Zillow. Zillow uses R to produce statistical predictive products. Zillow predicts full estimated costs of renting or purchasing real estate through the use of R. Zillow and its use of R allows its users to make better data driven decisions.http://strataconf.com/stratany2012/public/schedule/detail/26345

After doing some research, I read that the United States uses R in their national weather programs and reports. An example of what the national weather services use R’s statistical analysis tools to do, is forecasting weather predictions like flooding or snow blizzards. As inaccurate as these predictions frequently can be, R helps to minimize errors. R also helps them to generate graphics, representing current real-time forecasts and storm trajectories.http://analyticstraining.com/2014/examples-of-how-r-is-used/

John Deere use R for reliable time series modeling and geospatial analysis.
R is used by John Deere for several purposes including forecasting demand for equipment, to forecasting crop yields , and even optimizing the build order on the production line that produces the tractors. This is especially important because John Deere provides forecasts to more than half the world’s food supply. The results are integrated with Excel and SAP.

I found an article articulating the growth and adoption of R systems on business applications. One of the findings I found interesting, but not surprised was R being synthesized into marketing analytics. It would make sense that they would need to gather data on customer habits and so on so they can push out the right product, as well as where this product would do best at .

https://gigaom.com/2011/07/17/5-real-world-uses-of-big-data/
The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) used R language in BP’s oil leak case. To help US government have accurate and effective response to public, NIST used R language to run an uncertainty analysis that supply estimated evidences to US Government for best control the scale and scope of leaking oil.

Google uses R to calculate ROI on advertising campaigns; to predict economic activity; to analyze effectiveness on TV ads; and to make online advertising more effective. For example, Google has just released a new package for R: Causallmpact. This package allows Google to resolve the classical conundrum: how can we asses the impact of an intervention when we can not know what would have happened if we had not run the campaign? Also, this package gives the Google a “virtual” control. http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/09/google-uses-r-to-calculate-roi-on-advertising-campaigns.html

Google uses R and has created a new package for R. This package enables them to take a look at the effects on an advertising campaign of website clicks. Their info graphic is simple to read and makes it so that a user who is not familiar with the type of data can easily assess the information with a short explanation.

Facebook uses r for a varitey of functions. They are “Exploratory Data Analysis, Experimental Analysis, Big-Data Visualization, Human Resources, and user behaviour analysis related to status updates and profile pictures.” This allows Facebook to stay on top of current trends and predict future ones.

As I research for the companies that use R & R Studio in their business operations, I found out that many “big name” companies like Facebook, Bank of America, Google, New York Times etc use that software to carry out various process objectives. However what surprised me the most was to find out that Microsoft uses the software too to carry out some of their online xbox functions. This is because knowing the magnitude and the amount of intelligence Microsoft has, I was surprised that they did not create their own software tailor made to their processes and activities.

R is used by various companies all over the world including one of the largest motor companies, Ford. R is huge part of the revolution at Ford as they are using it for various data science related objectives. This includes breaking down data silos between analytic groups within Ford and understanding how drivers are using electric cars, based on opt-in telemetry data from the cars themselves.http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/11/ford-uses-r-for-data-driven-decision-making.html

After doing research, I realized that lots of financial institutions and companies in various industries use R to carry out functions and bring about various data related to their work and research. Examples include finding standard deviations, averages,maximum & minimum return and even various qualitative information as well.